Interview with Charlotte Pickering

In this interview, I had the great pleasure of interviewing writer Charlotte Pickering about the upcoming production ‘KITTEL: Doktor Faustus of the Third Reich'. She has shared insights into what audiences can expect from this show, as well as the inspiration and hard work that went into bringing this show to life.

What was the very first spark that made you want to tell Gerhard Kittel’s story on stage?

Quite by chance, I came across Robert P Eriksen’s research into Gerhard Kittel. Eriksen was picking up the case from German researcher Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz. Leonore’s research into Kittel was crushed by post-WW2 German academia. Hers is a key voice in the play. As soon as I started thinking about Kittel’s spectacular fall from grace, I realised that he was the real-life Doktor Faustus.

You’ve called Kittel “uncompromising” What was the hardest truth to write?

The hardest truth is that, had Gerhard Kittel been born in any other era, he would be remembered for his dazzling scholarly gifts -- and nothing else.

How do you hope audiences respond to the piece?

My hope is that audiences will be gripped by the drama, moved by the personal tragedy, fascinated by the history, intrigued by the ideas, and reflecting about the parallels with our town time.

How was it working with Jed Birch and the Heirs of Banquo team to bring your words to life?

Jed’s brilliant literary mind is imprinted on this performance. He has mulled every single word and potentiality in the script, making judicious excisions as necessary, and allowing the potent alchemy between principals Gerhard (John Henry) and Herr Herold (Kyle Brookes) to work its occultic magic. The cast is tough, talented, and each brings their own artistic understanding to the whole. This is a magnificent group of people, and I am honoured that they are breathing life into my words.

Kittel was both a respected theologian and a contributor to Nazi ideology. How did you approach writing such a character?

I saw him as the real-life Faustus. Like the Faust of legend, Kittel was a brilliant divinity scholar working in an esoteric field, who fell for Satan. In the show, Satan is, of course, Hitler.

The play is described as “meticulously researched” Could you talk us through your research process and sources?

Research of this sort inevitably leads one to the archives. I spent time in Tübingen and Cuxhaven, looking at documents – letters, memos, papers. Obviously, I have scrutinised Kittel’s own writings, many of which I own because the easiest way to access them was to buy them. I did extensive background research into the intellectual history of WW1 and WW2, German antisemitism and the Holocaust. I also looked at the historiography of German theology and German 19^th and 20^th century politics.

Writing about the Holocaust and antisemitism carries significant responsibility. How did you navigate that as a writer?

We must, as a species, face the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the dark heart of man that Joseph Conrad wrote about in 1899.  Its industrial, planned sadism has struck the solar plexus of our self-understanding. It is impossible, after the Holocaust, to idealise humankind.

I have a duty, everyone has a duty, to navigate the baleful singularity that is the Holocaust.

What I am hoping to convey in this play is that the Holocaust resulted from a peculiarly virulent form of racial hatred, namely antisemitism. This hatred was conceived of in biological, psychological and spiritual terms. For example, Gerhard Kittel believed that Jewish-Christians, i.e., Jews who had converted to Christianity, should, ideally, form their own churches and remain separate from the wider Christian community. He believed that Jews should be confined to a ghetto where they should pray for forgiveness for killing Christ.

The perennial hostility of the Christian churches towards Jews propagated this racial hatred. Jewish deicide had been a central tenet of Christianity for centuries. I remain depressed that it took the Catholic Church twenty years after the liberation of Belsen to remove the phrase “perfidious Jew” from the Good Friday liturgy. (Dimbleby’s 1945 report of the horrors he witnessed at Belsen is a moral signpost in the KITTEL play.)

As I mentioned in a recent interview with the Jewish Telegraph, it has been harder to engage the media and theatre press with KITTEL, i.e. with a story about antisemitism, than it was with my critically acclaimed novel, Messiah of the Slums, which featured a Muslim-woman protagonist.

Writer responsibility is a lofty concept. My approach is actually prosaic and piecemeal. I have stuck to the facts and did a lot of deep thinking about the messages and interactions as they arose.

KITTEL is a miniature of Germany’s appalling catastrophe. It shows how, to borrow from WB Yeats and Chinua Achebe, things fall apart. As Gerhard says in the play, Germany was a cultural “light bearer to the world”. The Humboldtian model for the modern university (copied by Harvard), Beethoven, Brahms, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Gauss, Kant, Nietzsche, Mendelssohn (Moses and Felix – both Jews), Goethe, Einstein, Martin Luther, Gutenberg’s printing press… all these German intellectual achievements dominate our humanities and sciences.

Yet militaristic and mighty Germany fell for a screaming and parochial pot-of-poison, Private Adolf Hitler. Having fallen for him, it did conceive and enact the Holocaust.

Gerhard Kittel fell into his own shadow. My priority as a writer, as a human agent in the world, is to navigate my own shadow and avoid stepping into yours.

What challenges did you encounter translating complex theological and historical ideas into theatrical action?

Careful thought and sequencing is necessary here. What is the human angle? This is the question I kept asking myself. Complex theology is not the stuff of an engaging play. But anyone can understand the intellectual history of Gerhard’s fall, a joining together of certain religious and political ideas which beguiled and preoccupied him. The premise of the play is actually very simple: Gerhard Kittel was a man of God (literally, an ordained Christian minister) who sold his soul to Hitler.

The play has been described as a warning for our own time. What parallels do you most want audiences to recognise?

The lessons to be drawn from Gerhard Kittel's story transcend antisemitism. One key parallel between the 1920s and today that the play brings out concerns narratives. Today, just as in the period after WW1, originally extremist views are becoming more and more mainstream until they are no longer questioned at all. KITTEL is a historical play, not a political manifesto, but its relevance for the present cannot be overstated.

What does theatre offer, in your view, that other forms of historical storytelling cannot?

The increasing artifice of our technology makes live performance the only art form that guarantees authenticity. The chances of awakening are greater because we are together in spacetime.

Theatre means that you, the viewer, is stepping toward us, the cast and crew. For two hours we share the same physical space. What a privilege on both sides!

What do you hope audiences take away from the play? Are there any particular discussions that you would like people to have?

I am hoping very sincerely that audiences reflect on what happens when faith in social democracy dies. The centre is not holding in Europe and in the United States. Social, ethnic and political tensions are high. Meanwhile, we remain, to paraphrase Nietzsche, human, all too human. The same human frailties prevail as they did in Germany between the wars. What can we do to avoid falling into our own shadow?

KITTEL is playing at the Unity Theatre Liverpool, from the 23rd to the 24th January. Full information can be found via this link: https://www.unitytheatreliverpool.co.uk/whats-on/kittel-doktor-faustus-of-the-third-reich